ZFS: The other new Apple file system that almost was—until it wasn’t

Enlarge / A premature announcement by Sun's then-CEO Jonathan Schwartz might have doomed ZFS on OS X. (credit: Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty - Edited by Aurich Lawson)

This article was originally published on Adam Leventhal's blog and is reprinted here with his permission.

I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple's launch of its DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple completed all but the fiddliest finishing touches without help from the DTrace team. Even when Apple did meet with us, we had no idea that it was mere weeks away from the finished product being announced to the world. DTrace was a testament both to Apple's engineering acumen as well as its storied secrecy.

At that same WWDC, Apple announced Time Machine, a product that would record file system versions through time for backup and recovery. How was it doing this? We were energized by the idea that there might be another piece of adopted Solaris technology. When we launched Solaris 10, DTrace shared the marquee with ZFS, a new filesystem that was to become the standard against which other filesystems are compared. Key among the many features of ZFS were snapshots that made it simple to capture the state of a filesystem, send the changes around, recover data, etc. Time Machine looked for all the world like a GUI on ZFS (indeed, the GUI that we had imagined but knew to be well beyond the capabilities of Sun).

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